Explain israel gaza conflict

A video of intense rocket fire over Israel popped up on Rami’s mobile, as the Palestinian peace activist sat in Gaza in the dark waiting for the next airstrike. The video was sent on WhatsApp by an Israeli friend who lived just a few kilometres away on the other side of the Israel-Gaza border fence but, because of walls and blockades, he had never met in person. It was November, during the worst flare up of cross-border fire since the 2014 war, sparked in part by a botched Israeli intelligence raid in South Gaza. Rami, a peace activist, sent back a video of Israeli airstrikes pounding his neighbourhood and asked “are you ok?” Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Start your free trial Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Start your free trial Get the best of The Independent Without the ads … [Read more...] about ‘No choice but to hope’: The personal stories behind a painful year in the Israel-Palestine conflict

Israel on Tuesday denied a European Parliament (EP) delegation access to the blockaded Gaza Strip, according to an official EP statement. "The Israeli authorities have once again refused the EP's Delegation for Relations with Palestine permission to enter the Gaza Strip," the statement read. The delegation, it added, had requested permission to enter the strip as part of a three-day planned mission to the Palestinian territories. Stating that the purpose of the visit was "to monitor the humanitarian situation caused by a decade of blockade", the statement asserted that Israel had barred successive EP delegations from entering Gaza since 2011. "The EP delegation started its work in East Jerusalem and other parts of the occupied West Bank on Tuesday and was set to visit Gaza on Thursday," it explained. As a result of the Israeli blockade and successive conflicts, the statement added, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip had "insufficient access to basic needs, such as potable drinking water, … [Read more...] about Israel denies EU Parliament delegation entry to Gaza

In the week that Uri Avnery, the scourge of colonialism, died in Tel Aviv, the Israeli government announced a further enlargement of its massive colonial project in the occupied West Bank. Plans were now advanced, it said on Wednesday, for a further 1,000 “homes” in Jewish “settlements” – still the word we must use for such acts of land theft – and final approval had been given for another 382. Today, 600,000 Jewish Israelis live in about 140 colonies constructed on land belonging to another people, the Palestinians, either in the West Bank or east Jerusalem. There is a state of normalcy about all this, the world’s last colonial conflict; a weariness with the figures, a lacklustre response to the huge construction enterprise on Palestinian territory. Charting the spread of red roofs across the hilltops of the West Bank, the swimming pools and the lawns and smart roadways, the supermarkets and orchards – all encircled by acres of … [Read more...] about Robert Fisk: Israel is building another 1,000 homes on Palestinian land and nobody is saying anything

When a news story descends into an argument about how near a politician might have been to a given grave in Tunisia on a visit four years ago, and with only some limited photographic evidence to go on, it is safe to say that, whatever its merits, that particular line of enquiry has run out of journalistic stream. The intervention of the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, into the latest Jeremy Corbyn controversy does add some currency to the story, for obvious reasons, but it doesn’t much alter the basic facts, such as we know and dispute them. The bigger picture, though, to be fair to all concerned, requires no such resolution of the minutiae of who laid what wreath where, and how far away the future leader of the opposition was from the earthly relicts of the butchers of the 1972 Munich Olympics. Mr Corbyn was in a place intended as a memorial to Palestinian freedom fighters, innocent civilians or terrorists or, perhaps in reality, all three categories. It is … [Read more...] about To put antisemitism claims behind him, Jeremy Corbyn needs to state clearly his position on Israel